Fortune Cookie Wisdom from a Blog

As my two faithful readers can see, I’ve been very quiet on this blog for some time now. I’ve not forgotten about it. Quite the contrary, actually, I’ve been fretting about it. You see, I can write six ways from Tuesday on an academic topic without breaking a sweat. But, when it comes to writing about myself, my life, my Same Old, Same Old I not only stop short, I fall off the cliff.

I’ve always written in some form or another, but have never been a journal keeper. The idea of logging away daily events is foreign to me, and a little strange. When I think of journaling I think of “Dear Diary…” and “For breakfast today, I had…” Srsly? This stuff is important?

This is why I started the blog; to warm to the habit and idea of logging away nearly every day. But, I’m puzzled, hesitant and… lost. I am a middle-class white girl who has been fortunate in life. I’ve never encountered any great adversities, and those that I have encountered seem overused, cliché, trite. There is no drama to explore, and I don’t feel I have a story to tell. Who wants to hear about the woes of a white girl with a good education and job? I am afraid that anything I write will seem self-aggrandizing.

Yet, while I’m writing this I am thinking to myself, but there are things I want to say, things I want to explore in my writing, thoughts and feelings that need the space of the page to grow. So, I ask you, what the hell is my problem?! How is it that I can have the former paragraph next to the latter and still mentally choke on my blog entries?

Someone much wiser than me recently told me that I am too hard on myself. Part of me believes this person, the other part of me disagrees and says, No, I’m not hard on myself, I’m setting the bar high and demanding my best. But at what point is my bar too high?

There is a blog I follow, Sleep Talkin Man. It is always good for a laugh and you can find it in my subscriptions to the right. The best post to-date was on June 2, 2010, when Adam comments that: “Your blue sky thinking is blighted with dark clouds and piss-poor ideas”. Thank you, Adam, for closed captioning my problem with my blog and my writing at present. And, for giving me a hearty laugh.

I have high expectations of myself and idyllic, blue sky hopes for this blog. Fat lot of good it does me though if I never post on it though. And, yes, it blighted with dark clouds of insecurity and my piss-poor ideas hang in the wings reminding me that for every good post there will be 10 bad ones.

So, aside from acquiring this quote on a t-shirt (and suggesting it for fortune cookie inserts), I will take to heart its unwitting assessment. Screw my dark clouds and hello my piss-poor ideas. This is my space for my thoughts- well written, important, or not. To hell with blue sky thinking, I need a reality check in daily writing.